First off, thank you for your service. I hope you get some tasty takeout meals while you’re sequestered in Indianapolis next month. I hear Bazbeaux makes a mean pizza pie.

Anyway, I wanted to offer a heartfelt plea as you go into your bracketing deliberations. This has nothing to do with the top-16 seeds, which you already reasonably identified a couple of weeks ago. Rather, I’m talking about those tricky final at-large selections, which no doubt will take up a lot of your time.

Having gone through this exercise myself several times, I do not envy you in this task. But one thing is clear to me, and I fervently hope you see things the same way: It’s time to give the little guys a shot.

Look, the bubble stinks. We all agree on that. It’s awful every year, sure, but this time, in particular, we have a bunch of power conference teams who have some good wins but a whole lot more lousy losses.